Exuberantly delicious and beautifully told, 'Falastin' is one of those life-changing cookbooks

My cookbook shelves are lined with hundreds of earnest volumes filled with culturally faithful recipes for legions of traditional dishes. Usually the recipes work and the dishes are correct, often they’re pretty good, occasionally they’re very good. But rarely, when cooked as written, are they so delicious that they make me want to cry.

Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley’s Falastin: a Cookbook, which Ten Speed Press published last month, is bursting with recipes from Palastine that do just that.

Because it’s described in the headnote as “the hugely popular national dish of Palestine,” I stuck a Post-It on the page with Chicken Musakhan on my first pass through the book, as a reminder to cook it soon. But it looked so simple, like there was nothing to it — just some cut-up chicken rubbed with spices and roasted, served on flat bread with cooked onions (how great could that be?) — so I kept passing it by.

Until one evening I didn’t.

It was gobsmackingly, soul-stirringly fabulous. The chicken, a whole quartered bird, gets tossed with a lot of cumin and sumac, plus cinnamon, allspice, olive oil, salt and pepper, then roasted. Once out of the oven, it gets layered on crisped pieces of torn flatbread with a lot of long-cooked, sumac-and-cumin-loaded sliced red onions, fried pine nuts, plenty of parsley and spooned over with the roasting juices from the chicken. More olive oil gets drizzled on, and more sumac. It’s a stunning, fragrant centerpiece. Before serving it, you pull apart the chicken pieces with your fingers into two or three piece each. Put it in the middle of the table, and have everyone dive in, pulling the chicken apart with fingers, grabbing some soaky, juicy, crispy bread and sumac-ky onions, and groaning with pleasure, and diving back in.

When can we have this again??!!

I went back and reread the headnote. The dish was traditionally made during olive-oil pressing season to celebrate the freshly-pressed oil, but now it’s enjoyed year-round. “Growing up, Sami ate it once a week,” goes the headnote. “It’s a dish to eat with your hands and with your friends, served from one pot or plate, for everyone to then tear at some of the bread and spoon on the chicken and topping for themselves.”

Traditionally, taboon bread is used in the dish. Baked on pebbles in a conical oven, the bread has a pock-marked surface that are great for catching the juices. But the recipe calls for any Arabic flatbread (we used pita from a local Lebanese bakery that I’d stashed in the freezer), or naan.

I can see why Tamimi’s mom, Na’ama, made it once a week: It’s fun and easy to make, probably no more than an hour from start to finish, and a great crowd-pleaser. I’ll be buying sumac futures this week: A full three tablespoons of the spice (a powerful anti-oxidant) go into the dish.

If you’re not familiar with Tamimi, some context may be helpful. Chances are you do know of Yotam Ottolenghi and his cookbooks. Tamimi is head chef for and a founding partner in Ottolenghi’s namesake London restaurant empire. He co-authored Ottolenghi’s first cookbook (Ottolenghi: the Cookbook, 2008). Together the two — led by Ottolenghi — created a style of produce-forward, Levant-accented, slouchy-chic improvisational cooking. In other words, what they did powerfully influenced the way so many of us cook now, and the way food looks on blogs and on Instagram — seductively dissheveled, vegetable happy and casually strewn with tons of herbs.

The two chefs went on to co-author Jerusalem: a Cookbook (2012). Both had grown up in Jerusalem in the 70s and 80s — Ottolenghi, who is Israeli and Italian, in the Jewish west part of the city and Tamimi, who is Palestinian, in the Muslim east. They didn’t know each other back home; they met in London, where they were both living in the 1990s. To the Jerusalem project, each brought his delicious perspective, and they wove together a gorgeous, deep, inspired, cookable portrait of their hometown. The book didn’t shy away from politics, but its explorations managed to unify rather than divide.

With Falastin, Tamimi explores the cooking of his beloved Palestine. “There is no letter ‘P’ in the Arabic language,” begins the introduction, so ‘Falastin’ is, on the one hand, simply the way ‘Falastinians’ refer to themselves.’”

Of course there is an “on the other hand” — and that’s the substance of the book, which Tamimi co-authored with Tara Wigley, a cook and writer who also co-authored Ottolenghi’s most recent book, Ottolengi Simple, and who is an integral part of the Ottolenghi family.

Cilantro-crusted roasted cod with tahini sauce

Beautifully photographed by Jenny Zarins, it’s a wonderful read that conveys so much about the culture that you might feel you’ve been there, and fallen in love with its people. A visit to the apartment-house kitchen of the “yogurt-making ladies of Bethlehem” gives richness to a recipe for balls of labneh (thickened yogurt) marinated in olive oil then rolled in dried herbs or spices. A trip to the Jerusalem shop where Kamel Hashlamon produces tahini that’s “somewhere between a paste and a liquid and truly good enough to drink” makes us understand what separates great tahini from all the bitter crap we get stateside (Humera sesame seeds from Ethiopia, bespoke millstone made by a master Syrian stonemason, cold-pressing at 140 degrees).

The authors, refusing to tip-toe around the politics, address head-on the difficult questions that arise as they tour us around. For instance, it becomes clear that because Kamel sells to a largely Israeli (but also Palestinian) market, some feel he has “sold out.” When Kamel justifies his position by saying “We are all living in the result of the game,” Tamimi doesn’t let him off easy. In the end, though, the last image of his “small stunning shop,” with its irresistible product, is of Israelis and Palestinians standing “side by side at the counter, looking through the glass, debating little more than which halva to buy.” Complicated, uneasy, but what what a privilege it is to be let in on it in a cookbook.

From a culinary point of view, Falastin is also a rare gift: a cookbook filled with exuberantly delicious recipes, each with the special flair of a super-gifted chef, but without the ridiculous, long lists of obscure ingredients and sub-recipes that you needed to start preparing three days ago. These are approachable, thoughtfully crafted and apparently carefully tested recipes that are easy to follow, simple enough to execute and clearly designed to work for a moderately capable home cook.

If the aesthetic driver of the Ottolenghi books is herbs, with Falastin it is spices — lots of spices, aromatic, dreamy and unapologetic. Flavors in all the dishes are dialed way up. (One touch I really appreciate: Tamimi and Wigley never leave us guessing about how much salt to use — they always specify, and it’s always right on or close.)

Back to my bookshelves and all those earnest volumes. Among all the serious Middle Eastern, Levantine, Mediterranean and North African cookbooks, I hadn’t been able to find an appealing recipe for ful medames — the traditional fava bean dish that’s mostly closely associated with Egypt. There were recipes, sure, but none found any joy in the dish — which is, after all, really just doctored canned fava beans.

Tamimi has a wonderful way of elevating the ordinary. His version of ful starts by ridding the beans of their canned taste — by draining, rinsing, then simmering them in water, a five minute process that makes all the difference. Once they’re drained again, cumin is invited to the party, along with the lemon, garlic and chile. A delightful salad of red onion, sumac and parsley goes on top, along with tomato; avocado adds cool and creamy depth. Soft boiled egg, which is optional, adds another dimension.

Finally, the ful medames I dreamed of — so good I will make sure to keep canned favas stocked, so I can whip it up on a regular basis. (This is what I mean by life-changing.)

Not surprisingly, there’s a little overlap with the dishes in Jerusalem: It would be odd for this book not to include hummus, for instance, or tahini sauce. But the books complement each other really well: While Jerusalem gave us Maqluba, a one-pot layered dish of eggplant, chicken thighs and rice inverted onto a plate to serve, Falastin gives us Maqlubet el Foul el Akdhar — Upside-Down Spiced Rice with Lamb and Fava Beans. (Will be making that soon as I can source some Iranian dried limes!)

And while Jerusalem proposes Kofta B’siniya (seared lamb-and-beef patties in tahini sauce), Falastin offers Kofta Bil Batinjan — Baked Kofta with Eggplant and Tomato. Another major crowd-pleaser!

Kofta Bil Batinjan — Baked Kofta with Eggplant and Tomato

For the three of us, this was a fabulous dinner two nights running — the leftovers were every bit as delectable.

There are so many recipes I still have marked to try. Preserved Stuffed Eggplants; Cauliflower and Cumin Fritters with Mint Yogurt; Shatta (an exciting looking red or green chile sauce); Na’ama’s Buttermilk Fattoush; Roasted Eggplant with Tamarind and Cilantro; a zucchini, garlic and yogurt dip called M’tawaneh; Buttery Rice with Toasted Vermicelli; Eggplant, Chickpea and Tomato Bake (Musaq’a); Pomegranate-Cooked Lentils and Eggplants; Lemon Chicken with Za’atar.

There are baked treats that look incredible, too: Sweet Tahini Rolls, and the triangular spinach pies called Fatayer Sabanekh; Warbat — filo triangles filled with cream cheese and pistachio and doused in rose syrup, and definitely a Chocolate and Qahwa Flour-Free Torte, flavored with lots of cardamom and espresso (Qahwa is coffee in Arabic).

I love this book. I’m happy to think of its treasure-filled pages, and it gives me hope for the future — in more ways than one.

RECIPE: Chicken Musakhan

RECIPE: Cilantro-Crusted Roasted Cod

RECIPE: Ful Medames

RECIPE: Baked Kofta with Eggplant and Tomato

Falastin: a Cookbook, by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley, Ten Speed Press, $35.

Favorite dish of summer 2020 so far: Andrea Nguyen’s tangy, fresh, umami-ful Vietnamese rice noodle salad bowl

Cutting to the chase here: This Vietnamese rice noodle salad — from Andrea Nguyen’s new(ish) book Vietnamese Every Day — is probably the most craveable single new (to me) recipe I’ve discovered in four months of daily cooking through the pandemic. That would be my favorite dish in something like 120 days of cooking. Or at least the one dish I know I’ll come back to again and again. It’s the kind of dish you’re excited to add to your life, the kind of dish you think about and crave. The kind of dish you wake up certain days and you simply have to have.

At its base, it’s pretty basic. Put salad greens in a bowl with cilantro and mint, and maybe a handful of bean sprouts and/or some shaved cucumber. Add a layer of cold rice noodles. Then the star of the dish — grilled skewers of meat, chicken or shrimp. Tuck in some pickled daikon and carrot, scatter on toasted peanuts or cashews plus more cilantro and mint, and serve with nuoc cham, the Vietnamese dipping sauce, to toss with as dressing.

It’s cool and salad-y, with a tangy, spicy umami zap of the nuoc cham. It’s fragrant with herbs, and fresh, and cool — perfect for summer. The hot skewer lands atop cold salad and rice noodles, all those herbs and pickle, and it all gets tossed with that delicious, tangy nuoc cham sauce, plus a pickly, nutty crunch — what could be better?

We came upon the rice noodle salad recipe because Wylie was in process of preparing a Crispy Lemongrass Salmon, from the same book. Nguyen writes that while salmon is not native to Vietnam, once her family tasted it in America, they adopted it as if it were. She makes a paste with lemongrass, brown sugar, shallot, Madras-style curry powder, and fish sauce, coats salmon fillets in it, then broils them. In the headnote, she suggests serving the salmon either with rice or on top of the rice noodle salad. Wylie jumped into action, pulled together the rice noodle salad — and we were all gobsmacked.

A week later, I was craving it again, so I tried it with the pork skewers offered in Nguyen’s recipe (and which are shown on the cover of the book!).

I enjoyed putting together the marinade (garlic, shallot, five-spice powder, sugar, molasses, fish sauce, soy sauce and canola oil), and making grillable skewers out of pork shoulder — a cut I’d always thought had to be cooked long, low and slow. I couldn’t get boneless pork shoulder, but it was easy to cut bones out of a small picnic roast (a.k.a. pork butt), and slice the meat across the grain into quarter-inch-thick strips. Marinated and grilled on a cast-iron stove-top grill, the pork skewers were superb: tender, charry, flavorful, just delicious. No doubt they’d be even better grilled over charcoal.

It also seemed obvious that, as Nguyen suggests, the bowl would be fabulous topped with all kinds of alternative things. Shrimp — either marinated and grilled or poached and chilled. Chicken, with this same marinade. Beef (though I’m not usually craving beef with my salad). That’s why we’re calling our adapted version Rice Noodle Salad Bowl with XYZ Skewers.

To go vegan, you can marinate and then grill tofu and vegetables, and use that in place of the skewers.

If you’re starting from scratch, getting all the ingredients together takes some work, for sure. But you can make the key elements in advance and keep them on hand, so it comes together either in a jiff or with just a little effort, depending on the protein.

Nuoc cham base is worth keeping in the fridge (for up to two weeks); add lime and fresh chiles just before serving. Pickled daikon and carrot can be kept on hand in the fridge as well (we used a Japanese salady-pickle called Namasu, from Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking, since it’s so similar to the one offered in Nguyen’s book), and rice noodles boil up quick and easy. That means if you keep greens, cilantro, mint and either cucumber or bean sprouts on hand (along with roasted peanuts or cashews), and a sudden craving strikes — which it will, if you’re anything like me — you just have to think about the protein.

A super-easy alternative to Nguyen’s lemongrass salmon is fillets of Koji-Marinated Salmon. (It’s easy as long as you have shio koji (the recipe for that is included in the salmon recipe). That piece of fish — which is five minutes broiler-to-table once it has marinated a day or three in the shio koji — is awesome on that bowl. So what if it’s Japanese and the noodles are Vietnamese? It works, and it’s delicious. But honestly, any simple grilled fish or seafood would do.

OK, maybe you’re ready to get to it. Just think of the dish as a way to riff. Try it once as suggested with pork, if you’re so inclined. And then embrace it as a fabulous vehicle for whatever you feel like.

[RECIPE: Rice Noodle Salad Bowl with XYZ Skewers]

Cool as a cuke: Four cucumber-happy salads to refresh you through a hot and heavy summer

Blimey, we all need a chill pill! In the absence of an effective one, we’ve been turning to the coolest of vegetables, the cucumber.

The Oxford Companion to Food tells us that the cucumber is “one of the oldest cultivated vegetables,” that it has been grown for some 4,000 years, that it may have originated in South India and that Christopher Columbus introduced it to Haiti in 1494. Jessica B. Harris points out, however, in The Africa Cookbook, that the some scholars feel that the cucumber may have come from Central Africa.

But wait — isn’t “one of the oldest cultivated vegetables” technically a fruit?

“It is a fruit,” says my friend Tim Simmonds, a Dallas botanist — and so are squashes, both summer and winter, including pumpkins. “Same big happy family.”

The curcurbit family, that is: the vine-y plant group that also includes watermelons, chayotes, gourds, cassabananas (a.k.a. melocotón) and the kiwano (a.k.a. African horned cucumber or jelly melon).

Given the cucumber’s origin story, it’s not surprising that it is popular in India — especially in the form of raita.

The cooling cucumber salad accompanies just about any kind of Indian meal, of course. But I’ve been known to enjoy a bowl of it on its own for a soothing lunch (particularly in a pandemic!).

Ours features grated cucumber, toasted cumin and a touch of lemon juice.

A Cucumber Sunomono was literally the first recipe we test-drove for our recent review of Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking, since the cucumber salad is a frequent starter of Japanese meals. This one, which weaves wakame seaweed in with the cukes, sports a jaunty grated-ginger garnish. We fell in love, not surprisingly. Maybe you will, too (let us know in a comment!).

Cucumbers also make appearances in Sakai’s recipe for Potato Salada and Dallas chef Justin Holt’s Salaryman Potato Salad.

But we’re not counting those in our four, so wait, there’s more!

This pretty Cucumber, Radish and Feta Salad came together as we riffed on a Levantine dish called khiar bel na’na, starring thin-sliced cukes, dried mint and orange-blossom water. We added radishes, scallions, feta and fresh mint (which layers beautifully with the dried). Lately it has become a house favorite.

And finally, this Scandanavian Cucumber-Dill Salad — which is wonderful with poached salmon, Cold Poached Arctic Char or even Swedish meatballs.

A happy development, at least in my neck of the woods, is that organic Persian cucumbers have become more readily available, even during the pandemic. They have lovely texture (as long as they’re nice and fresh), they’re less watery than English cukes but more flavorful than most hothouse cukes, and they don’t require peeling — a win win win. Though sizes for all kinds vary, generally speaking you can figure two Persian cucumbers for one medium English cucumber, or three for a large English cuke.

As you’ll see from the above recipes, many cultures salt cucumbers and let them sit to draw out the water and ensure great texture; sometimes gentle squeezing is called for as well. Hope you enjoy these refreshing treats.

Stay cool. Think cuke. Wear a mask. Stay healthy.

[RECIPE: Cucumber Raita]

[RECIPE: Cucumber Sunomono]

[RECIPE: Cucumber, Radish & Feta Salad]

[RECIPE: Cucumber-Dill Salad]

Dreaming of a Mexican beach vacation? This vibrant aguachile from Colima will (almost!) take you there

You might have to squint real hard to pretend your patio — or a picnic table at your city park — is in fact a beach in Mexico. But take a bite of this gorgeous, suave shrimp aguachile and it’s not hard to feel thousands of miles away.

In the last few years in the United States, aguachiles have eclipsed ceviches as the raw seafood treat grabbing attention; in Mexico, they’ve been popular much longer. Unlike ceviches, which involve a relatively long soak in lime juice for the raw seafood, aguachiles get just a very brief bath in serrano-spiked citrus (aguachile means water infused with chiles).

The dish was born in Mexico’s Sinaloa state, as an excellent story published last year in Eater explains. And though you find aguachiles in restaurants from Mexico City to Houston to New York City to Los Angeles using just about every type of seafood, including scallops, tuna, snapper and yellowtail, on Mexico’s west coast where they were born, they are all about shrimp. (Not from the start, though, as Michael Snyder’s Eater story explains.)

Chef de Cuisine Olivia Lopez’s aguachile at Billy Can Can in Dallas

It was an aguachile that helped revive me after two and half months of confinement, when Thierry, Wylie and I ventured out to a restaurant a few weeks ago. We dined on the patio at Billy Can Can, our favorite modern Texan dining saloon (which I helped open in 2018 when I worked for the company that owns it.)

The dish was gorgeous and bright; I loved the way the dabs of avocado purée played with the lime and chile, and the shrimp had beautiful texture and flavor — unlike the rubbery, eraser-like creatures that over-soaked ceviche shrimp often become.

I asked Olivia Lopez, the restaurant’s chef de cuisine who created the dish, to tell me about it. She got a dreamy look in her eye as she started talking about making aguachile back home in Tecomán, her hometown in the state of Colima — which is about 700 miles south of the part of Sinaloa where aguachile was born. Her friend Nayely would make it, and they’d take it to the beach, where they’d enjoy it, with toastadas, along with coconut water or beers.

Billy Can Can Chef de Cuisine Olivia Lopez | Photo courtesy of Billy Can Can

Colima is one of the most important lime-growing states in Mexico, she told me (the other is Michoacán), and on the road from their home in Tecomán to Playa El Real, “all you see are lime trees and palm trees. And a lot of lizards.”

For Billy Can Can’s aguachile, Lopez blanches the shrimp before their lime-serrano soak, as her customers don’t love the idea of raw shrimp, she says. To compensate for that and prevent over “cooking” from lime, she adds olive oil to the sauce.

We were thrilled when she generously offered to share her recipe with Cooks Without Borders. But could we have it the raw shrimp way, just as Lopez makes it for herself at home — the way her friend Nayely did in Tecomán? Lopez was happy to oblige.

Happily, it’s very easy to do. And it’s so spectacularly delicious that we will be making it frequently — as frequently as we dream of a beach vacation in Mexico, which is to say constantly.

In our version, raw, butterflied shrimp get a quick 10-minute dunk in lime juice with a little salt and a splash of Worcestershire sauce. (“Yes, they use that in Mexico!” Lopez says.) The marinating juice then gets puréed with serrano chiles, cilantro and avocado, and the beautiful, emerald-green sauce that results gets tumbled with the shrimp. Transfer it to a platter, dress it up with sliced cucumber, avocado and red onion, and Playa El Real is yours. You can find tostadas in a Latin-American supermarket, and probably young coconuts for coconut water as well.

One small detail: The aguachile is meant to be eaten immediately, so the shrimp doesn’t get overcooked in the lime. It did take Lopez and her friends a few minutes to get to the beach with it, but that’s OK, she says; you just want to be sure to eat it within an hour.

Honestly, once you behold that gorgeous dish you’ve made in your own kitchen, I don’t think you could wait that long.

RECIPE: Aguachile, Colima-Style

Say hello to the green gazpacho of your dreams

There are a grillion versions of green gazpacho out there — many of them likeable, some (like Yotam Ottolenghi’s in Plenty) lovable. But I’ve never found one that made me stop and say, OK, you are the green gazpacho of my dreams.

I enjoy versions with yogurt, but the green gazpacho of my dreams is vegan. And even though a gazpacho without bread is technically not a gazpacho, the green gazpacho of my dreams is gluten-free. That’s because when I crave green gazpacho, I’m craving something very clean and pure. I’m wanting something intensely chlorophyllic, and herbal — but also tangy.

The green gazpacho of my dreams is something I can throw together in a flash, as a satisfying and energizing lunch, or a refreshing prelude to a lovely summer or late spring dinner. It should be basic enough to make for myself and family on a weekday, but gorgeous enough to start off a celebratory dinner party with friends (if we are ever able to do that again!).

It has to have body, and a little richness. I’ve seen recipes for versions involving avocado, but I’m nor looking for that kind of unctuousness. (Though I do adore diced ripe avocado as a garnish on classic Gazpacho Sevillano.)

Sometimes the way out of a culinary conundrum like this is to go back to the basics. I looked to traditional ajo blanco, the cold almond and garlic soup from Malaga, Spain that’s also known as gazpacho blanco, white gazpacho.

Yes! Raw almonds add just the right body to this soup, without the tannic bite that’s so nice with the walnuts in Ottolenghi’s Plenty version. If almonds work here, perhaps raw cashews would as well. I tried that on round two, and liked it even better — it imparted a little more roundness and depth. But either works great.

You’ll want to use your best sherry vinegar and olive oil in this soup; they are more than just supporting players.

Here is your ticket to summer-long green greatness:

As you can see in the recipe, the ingredients are basic, easy to keep on hand for when a craving comes knocking. No need for advance planning, as you don’t need to chill it; just plop two or three ice cubes in each bowl before you serve. Or make it ahead, and chill it in the fridge. For maximum delight, garnish it with a flurry of soft herbs — any combination of dill, chervil, parsley, cilantro, basil, mint, chives, tarragon, celery leaves and sliced scallion greens (OK, those last two are not technically herbs, but you get the idea). Or just add a swirl of your best olive oil on top.

RECIPE: The Greenest Gazpacho

This refreshingly minty Levantine-style salad is missing a key ingredient — that's why we call it 'fattoush-ish'

What — no toasted pita?! That’s why we call this minty, sumac-y salad ‘fattoush-ish.’

Fans of fattoush — the bread and herb salad that’s popular through the Levant year-round — are divided about how toasted pita, a key ingredient, should play in the bowl. Traditionalists like the pita soaked in the salad’s lemon, olive oil and sumac dressing so it’s soft, like the soaky bread in a traditional Tuscan bread salad. Modernists add shards of well-toasted pita at the last second, for a crisp crunch.

Traditionally eaten at iftar, the evening meal that breaks the fast during every night during Ramadan, fattoush is delightfully light and refreshing. It’s a salad to riff on. Some cooks insist it must include purslane, the tangy salad herb that grows like a weed in the Mediterranean. (Stateside, you can often find purslane in Middle-Eastern or Mexican groceries.) Some versions of fattoush include green bell pepper; others don’t. Occasionally you see radishes. You can use scallions or onions, cherry tomatoes or regular ones, romaine or arugula, or both. Some versions go light on sumac, a bright-flavored, lemony spice; others play it up big. (Our recipe takes the middle sumac path.)

If you’re not already familiar with fattoush, it’s a great time to get to know it. Once you’re in possession of a jar of dried sumac and some dried mint (we favor spearmint), you might even be able to pull it together with ingredients on hand.

Craving fattoush’s minty, sumac-y, scallion-y flavors, I had everything but pita. (One of the challenges of The Great Confinement is not having all the ingredients required for culturally correct renditions of dishes.) I went ahead with the fattoush program anyway — and way glad I did.

Leave out the pita bread, as our recipe does, and suddenly you’ve got a delightful salad that satisfies anyone avoiding carbs: It’s gluten-free and paleo-friendly. It’s also just the thing to counterbalance all that heavy comfort food many of us find ourselves indulging in more often than usual. (Start dinner with fattoush-ish, and that giant plate of lasagna doesn’t count!)

Or go ahead and add some pita: One piece, split in half and each saucer-shape crisply toasted, makes it legit. Break the two toasted sides into bite-sized pieces before adding to the salad. Traditionalists, please double the dressing and toss the pita shards in half of it a few minutes before you’ll serve the salad. Modernists, add the shards at the very last minute.

Here’s the recipe:

RECIPE: Fattoush-ish

Hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Use what you know, what's sitting in your crisper (and your imagination!) to make an Iced Green Disco Soup

This coming Saturday (as we mentioned in a recent story), April 25 is World Disco Soup Day, organized by Slow Food Youth Network. To help with the goal of ending food waste (and having fun doing it!), we’d like to offer a way to think about those green vegetable odds and ends in your crisper in a new way. It’s easy to round up wilted greens and tired carrots, throw in some lentils or beans and turn them into a delicious hot soup.

But what about making them into something fresh and cool? Something that speaks of spring or summer and spotlights everything green? A delightful cold green soup!

To help you achieve that with whatever you happen to have that needs to be used in your fridge, let’s think about the world’s classic cold soups and what makes them work.

There’s vichyssoise, France’s purée of leeks and potato. The potato and leek combo can be a vehicle to which you can add leafy greens or lots of herbs. Add watercress (another classic) and you get a gorgeous, emerald-green cold watercress soup. You could also add a arugula or parsley or mint or basil — or any combo that sounds good to you.

There’s tarator, Bulgarian yogurt soup — a purée of cucumbers, walnuts, garlic, dill, olive oil and a lot of yogurt. (I make that all the time in the summer.) The cukes and yogurt (the same combo you find in cucumber raita) are a classic vehicle, and the walnuts add depth, richness and body.

Once it’s tomato season again, you can make gazpacho sevillano-style disco soups.

Of course there’s gazpach sevillano, the most famous, but it’s not tomato season — and we’re going for the green. There’s white gazpacho, too, which gets body and richness from almonds, brightness from green grapes and a lovely bite from garlic.

Once of my favorite soups is the Green Gazpacho in Yotam Ottolenghi’s vegetarian cookbook, Plenty. Though it has much in common with tarator (Ottolenghi says it’s loosely based on it), the chef throws in a lot (6 cups!) of raw baby spinach, a cup of basil leaves, sherry vinegar (as in gazpacho) and peppers. So it’s hard to think of it as a disco soup — unless you have a garden that’s producing tons of spinach. But it does help give us a blueprint: You might have some spinach, and/or other greens you want to throw in raw. (You don’t need 6 cups to make it delicious.)

So think about what you have, and how it might behave like in ingredient in a classic soup.

Then dive into your fridge. We’re going to make a green soup today, so everything has to be green, or white, or something in between. (You’ll find another use for those beets and that leftover half a can of tomatoes. If you can’t think of something, drop us a note in a comment and we’ll help!)

• You want something for body: either nuts (raw or toasted), or potatoes (which you’ll boil before puréeing), a little rice (hopefully cooked and leftover), or even stale bread. I had raw walnuts in the freezer; I’d toast them in the oven (5 minutes at 350). If you’re using stale bread, soak it briefly in water.

• Grab anything green thing that you either enjoy eating raw (herbs or salad greens on their way out, scallions). I had a lot of parsley stems: They have great flavor and gorgeous color (and lots of super-healthy phytochemicals). I didn’t have carrot tops, but those are also delicious raw (or briefly cooked). Really! I also had a few sugar snap peas: I love them raw, but they leave Thierry and Wylie cold. I could sneak them in.

• What do you have that’s green that’s starting to look a little sad and that normally benefits from cooking? That might be broccoli, rapini, green beans, kale, etc. I had odds and ends from a farm box that were looking wilty — two baby bok choys, a little broccoli, a few green beans. And a bunch of radishes had lovely greens still attached. Those are good quickly cooked.

Rescued from the crisper drawer. If I hadn’t made Iced Green Disco Soup, who knows what fate they’d have suffered?

• If you have a few tablespoons of yogurt and a few cloves of garlic, your soup can resemble Ottolenghi’s Green Gazpacho. You’ll also want olive oil and vinegar, for gazpacho-like brightness and dimension.

With that, we’re ready to roll: Anything that needs cooking, you’ll simmer in water or vegetable broth (our master recipe tells you how to make vegetable broth from peelings and things you might throw away). Then you’ll throw in any greens that you’d rather not eat raw — like radish or turnip greens — for a quick blanch. That’ll get puréed.

Separately, you’ll purée all the other stuff — raw greens, cucumbers, green bell pepper, herbs, nuts, yogurt, olive oil, vinegar, salt and anything spicy you might want (serrano chile, white pepper).

Then stir the two together. Serve in small bowls, with a couple cubes of ice, another drizzle of olive oil, and any lovely fresh herbs you might like to feature whole (the last-minute add-ins are totally optional). Do a little dance: Your Iced Green Disco Soup will make a huge splash!

Here’s a master recipe that’ll offer more help, with all kinds of options built in:

If you stare into your fridge and need some advice or help, please don’t hesitate to ask in a comment — I’ll do my best to jump in quickly!

Happy dancing. Keep it green.

April 25 is Slow Food Youth Network's World Disco Soup Day: Let us help you build a rockin' soup!

Four years ago, Slow Food Youth Network founded an annual international event — World Disco Soup Day. On that day each year, parties are thrown in which food waste is turned into a disco soup. The goal is to end food waste, raise awareness around zero waste, feed people and celebrate when you do save food.

This year’s event is coming right up: Saturday, April 25.

It’s easy to celebrate saving food when what you create from food scraps is delicious. Which it can always be — and we’re here to help show you how to make it so.

As part of the event, SFYN are asking participants to upload recipes from their elders that make delicious use of food scraps. I was about to do that, but when I was asked to start uploading ingredients and quantities, I realized it wasn’t going to work: This isn’t the approach we take when we cook this way. Instead, we peer into the fridge and think about how we’re going to use that cup of leftover black beans and those two boiled potatoes, those three celery stalks that are about to wilt and the cupful of arugula that’s too limp for a salad.

More often than not, we make a soup. And from now on, I’ll think of it as a disco soup! (Thank you, SFYN!).

We kicked off New Year’s in January by proclaiming 2020 The Year of the Soup, and gave a master recipe for making a Sunday Super Soup from stuff in the pantry and leftovers in the fridge. Here’s the story (which walks through how to change your relationship with food scraps), and here’s a more formalized version of the master recipe:

I’m hoping SFYN’s young members find the master soup recipe useful. (I’m a member of regular Slow Food USA, the Dallas Fort Worth chapter.)

If you’re not accustomed to cooking this way, now is a great time to start! You can be super mindful of not throwing out usable food scraps this week. Save everything. I use a dedicated zipper bag for odds and ends trimmed from carrots and onions, stray herbs, etc.

And we will help you strategize! If you find yourself with a cupful of white beans, some celery and half an onion, for instance, we’ll tell you how to turn that into a salad that makes a lovely lunch — or your own disco soup for next Saturday!

Just let us know in a comment at the end of this story. (PLEASE comment — we are eager to hear from you and engage!) We’ll suggest ideas — and everyone else can jump in an we can toss them back and forth.

In the meantime, we’re going to be thinking about ideas for cold disco soup, in case the weather is fine whether you might be on Saturday. Green gazpacho!

Sound good? Save scraps! Please share this story, with the hashtags #worlddiscosoupday #wdsd20 #Re_generation #fillbelliesnotbins #slowfoodyouthnetwork #sfyn

Plan for a big ol’ disco soup on Saturday, April 25. And stay safe.

Celebrate Easter, Passover (or spring in general!) with butterflied leg of lamb on the grill

It’s kind of strange that I find myself with these ingredients during such trying circumstances, but a well priced on-line special on semi-boneless leg of lamb and another on organic asparagus presented itself when I was scrambling to find groceries yesterday. Somehow, a delivery spot opened up — not always easy. An Easter/Passover miracle!

Maybe it’s by design on the part of the grocer: holiday foods on holiday special. If that’s the case, maybe it has happened to you as well. Or maybe later this spring you’ll find yourself in possession of a leg of lamb. If so, here’s what I’m thinking: Dust off the Weber (or whatever your grilling set-up; our base-model Original Kettle is already set up on our tiny patch of townhouse patio).

Since we’re outside so much less these days, and it suddenly turned into a gorgeous day in Dallas, grilling our non-or-every-denominational holiday dinner feels like just the thing to do.

A simple marinade of red wine vinegar, garlic, cilantro, mint and olive oil goes on the lamb two hours (or more) before you grill it. If you don’t have those particular herbs, but you have some thyme or rosemary — even dried — that’ll work just as well.

Because you open up the butterflied leg rather than tying it, there’s more surface area for grilling and a shorter grilling time. Depending on how hot your coals are and the size of your lamb leg, it should take between 12 and 22 minutes.

If you’re doing asparagus as well, just toss that in a little olive oil, salt and pepper, and put it on the grill when you flip the lamb.

Here’s the recipe:

Happy spring, happy holiday. Hopefully happier days are ahead!

Got romaine leaves? Turn them into tabbouleh- or tuna-cannellini salad-filled dream boats

It was a classic cooking-in-place moment: As I scrounged around in the fridge, even more mindful than usual of eating or cooking with every last veg before it wilted, I found a bag of romaine hearts that wasn’t nearly full enough to make a salad for the three of us.

The tender leaves still looked lovely, though — why not use them to scoop up something delicious?

More scrounging, and I found half a bunch of mint, two stray scallions and the better part of a bunch of Italian parsley: all things I didn’t have plans for in the next 48 hours and should be used. Got it — tabbouleh!

I knew I had bulgur (I do keep a well-stocked pantry) and a lemon, but there was just one hitch: no tomato. I did have some grape tomatoes, though — not the most flavorful things in the world, but the rest of the tabbouleh ingredients could lift them up.

Especially as I’d been playing with Annisa Helou’s tabbouleh recipe in her gorgeous, award-winning cookbook Feast: Food of the Islamic World. Her tabblouleh gets glorious depth from a Lebanese 7-Spice Mixture (sabe bharat) and cinnamon. (Don’t fret if you can’t manage the 7-Spice: Helou offers ground allspice as a sub.) If you do want to make the 7-Spice Mixture, here’s the recipe, which will fill your life with beguiling aromas, so it’s worth making just for that.

Into a salad bowl went chopped parsley, mint and those grape tomatoes (which I diced smaller than I would have an actual tomato), a little bulgur soaked briefly in boiling water and well drained, the spices, the juice of a lemon, a glug of good olive oil, salt and freshly ground black pepper. Tossed well, and onto a platter with those tender romaine leaves: voilà our excellent lunch on the fly!

After that I was thinking: This probably wouldn’t be the last time, during The Great Confinement, that we’d be faced with stray romaine leaves. Normally I’d tear them up and add them to other lettuces for a green salad, but salad greens these days aren’t necessarily a given. What else could romaine leaves be filled with?

Bingo: tuna and cannellini salad, which happens to be one of my pantry cooking favorites.

Here’s the recipe, which calls for either a can of cannellinis or dried cannellinis:

Stay safe, healthy and well fed, everyone.

RECIPE: Lebanese 7-Spice Mixture

RECIPE: Classic Tabbouleh

RECIPE: Tuna and Cannellini Bean Salad

How a bag of frozen peas got me through the zombie apocalypse and made it feel like spring

One frigid January a few years back, when I was in process of reviewing a big-deal chef’s new restaurant, I asked my server about the “garden English peas” in a menu description of a fish dish. No way anyone’s garden was producing English peas that time of year, I thought. The dutiful server headed to the kitchen and came back with Chef’s answer — the name of some local farm that was supposedly growing the peas for him. Mm-hm.

Not long after the review ran, the restaurant’s sous chef sent me a note: Those peas? They were frozen. The sous-chef was sure of this, he wrote, because Chef had sent him out to the supermarket to buy bags of frozen peas that afternoon.

My new BFF (sorry, Teach!)

Not that I’d been fooled. In the best of times, frozen peas are a savvy cook’s secret ally, so I’d figured that fish dish’s poetic menu flourish had been an icy deception.

Even in the best of times I keep a bag or two of frozen peas on hand. And now this crazy season, when gorgeous springtime produce is only the stuff of dreams, a bag of frozen peas has become my new best friend.

Use it to make a ridiculously easy minted pea soup that tastes as lovely as if you had shelled a bushel’s worth. It’s achieved by sweating butter lettuce in melted butter, adding frozen peas and water, simmering a bit and blitzing with a blender.

Defrosted frozen peas play a starring role in one of my favorite dishes in recent cookbook-publishing years: Chef Michael Solomonov’s quinoa, pea and mint tabbouleh from Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking. Again, it’s a super-easy recipe that makes great use of ingredients that haven’t been hard to procure during the COVID-19 crisis.

And finally, my current favorite happy-hour bite: a creamy dip whipped up in a flash from frozen peas and ricotta, scented with mint and lemon zest. I like to swirl in a little extra ricotta at the end, but not all the way, so a swipe of a crouton gets a contrasty bite. It’s lovely with a glass of crisp white wine.

It’s just the kind of little luxury that could make you forget — if only for a moment — about the zombie apocalypse and imagine it’s a normal, delightful, optimistic spring.

RECIPE: Ridiculously Easy Minted Pea Soup

RECIPE: Quinoa, Pea and Mint Tabbouleh

RECIPE: Pea-Ricotta Dip

Need a lift? Throw together a batch of these spicy, zingy (addictive!) taquería carrots

UPDATED: August 2, 2020

First came the cravings for comfort carbs: mac and cheese (or any pasta smothered in sauce); warm chocolate chip cookies; sourdough bread. There’s a reason the boxes of pasta were the first edible things to disappear off the shelves in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

After a week or two of that, I started craving anything tangy: the lemons and limes that were so hard to get our hands on, som tum (Thai green papaya salad); dill pickles.

I also kept thinking about the zingy, hot, crunchy pickled carrots we used to love munching in L.A. taquerías. Known in Mexico as zanahorias escabeches, they are super easy to achieve with very limited resources. And four and a half long months later, they still keep hitting the spot.

If you have any carrots in your fridge — and any kind of chile peppers — you can make these in just a few minutes. The carrot slices are cooked very briefly in a half-vinegar, half-water solution with salt and aromatics; chiles and onion are added off-heat to keep the flavors fresh.

They are just the thing to make a video-chat happy hour with friends even brighter. Mix a margarita, open a beer, show off your glorious carrots, crunch away, and dream together of a bright and pickly future.

RECIPE: Taquería Carrots

Celebrate Norooz — Persian New Year — with an emerald-green ash-e-reshteh New Year's bean soup

We could all use a little lift, even on the first day of spring, the day Norooz (also known as Nowruz) — Persian New Year — is celebrated.

This gorgeous vegetarian soup, which traditionally celebrates the spring holiday, involves ingredients you might well have on hand; dried spearmint and saffron are about as exotic as the ingredient list gets. Both of those are used to make the garnishes you’ll finish the soup with: mint oil and saffron water.

Most challenging might actually be the ingredient that in normal times would seem the most mundane: dried linguine. If you have just a little — a third of a pound is all the recipe calls for, and you could certainly use just a quarter pound or less, or really use any kind of long noodle — you’ll be good to go.

The recipe starts with a cup of mixed dried beans and lentils, and you could use almost any kind in any combination, so gotta love that, too. Simmer them till they’re nearly tender, then throw in a bunch of greens — spinach, parsley and scallions. If you don’t have fresh spinach, frozen will work just fine. Cook the pasta and drop it in.

That’s basically the soup, which then gets garnishes: sliced onions sautéed with turmeric, the mint oil, a dollop of yogurt and saffron water.

It’s so beautifully green and herbal and perfumed that it seems to promise that everything’s going to be all right. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do. Happy spring. Happy new year!

Baba ganoush fever: How can burnt eggplant become a dip that’s so friggin’ brilliant and addictive?

Five years ago, an 800-year old chickpea dip suddenly became a global obsession. Now, something tells us that baba ganoush — the smoky, lemony eggplant dip that’s a mezze-table favorite all over the Levant and beyond — may be about to steal the spotlight from its foodie-star brother.

Baba ganoush’s charms can be elusive to those of us who dwell in the Americas. Unless we have Levantine roots, we may not have been exposed much (if at all) to exemplary baba — or muttabal, as it’s called in Syria. The stuff you find in supermarkets, if you do manage to find one baba ganoush among the grillions of plastic hummus tubs that have taken over the refrigerated case, tends to be pale-flavored and forgettable. Meanwhile, I’ve read recipes that suggest adding Liquid Smoke. Liquid Smoke!

I knew that the babas that turned my head over a lifetime of eating in Lebanese restaurants were the unabashedly smoky ones. But somehow, I never wondered how they got their smoke. Or what gave the best ones their wonderful creamy texture. Or how much tahini, lemon or garlic would make a baba ganoush sing.

Somewhere in the back of my semitic mind I understood that the dish was related to the eggplant “caviar” my Jewish grandma used to make. (She roasted eggplants, cutting them in half first, but never long enough to get them smoky, and there was no tahini involved after that.)

Happily — life-changingly, perhaps — it’s easy to make a brilliant one, especially if you have access to an old-fashioned charcoal grill like a Weber. You can also make a pretty outstanding one using your kitchen broiler. In case you want to cut to the chase and achieve immediate baba bliss, here’s the recipe:

The technique is simple: Poke holes all over whole eggplants, then roast them, either under your broiler or directly on coals on the Weber, turning them once, until they’re completely charred and seem to collapse.

Eggplants roasting directly atop live coals in a Weber grill

Cut them in half, scoop out the flesh — which will have taken on wonderful smokiness — place in a sieve and mash the flesh over a bowl to get rid of its bitter liquid and achieve a lovely soft texture. Separately, whisk together tahini and lemon juice till fluffy, then add the mashed eggplant, crushed garlic and salt. Spread the dip on a serving plate, drizzle on some good olive oil and scatter with chopped parsley, and you have baba ganoush heaven. Really, it’s that easy.

And it’s a fun dish to make. It’s fun charring the eggplants on the grill, and delightful when you whisk the tahini and lemon to fluffiness. It’s even fun to pull the flesh out of the charred skins with your fingers.

Once roasted, the flesh inside is meltingly tender.

More on technical details in a moment, but first a word about baba ganoush’s history.

Curiously, I was unable to turn up much background about the dip, especially anything definitive. There’s no entry for baba ganoush (or baba ganouj, or baba ghanoush, or baba ghannuge, its alternate spellings) in The Oxford Companion to Food, or in The Encyclopedia of Food and Culture that takes up probably way too much real estate in my cookbook case. Unlike the Wikipedia page for hummus, which boasts two fulsome paragraphs about origin and history and nearly 700 words about regional preparations, Wikipedia’s baba ganoush wisdom is weirdly scant, pretty much limited to a stab at its etymology. (Baba, everyone agrees, is Arabic for “father” or “daddy,” and the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that Ghannuj is “perhaps a personal name.”)

The most intriguing tidbit I turned up came from my brilliant former colleague at The Los Angeles Times (now retired from the paper), Charles Perry, who wrote in a 1997 story about eggplant and its history that “The ancestor of today's baba ghanouj was flavored with ground walnuts instead of tahini.” Beyond that, we have only found speculation about the dish’s history. (If you are an expert, please weigh in with a comment! I am attempting to contact Charlie, who published Scents & Flavors: A Syrian Cookbook in 2017 — which I just ordered — and who I’m pretty sure possesses more intelligence on the subject; will update if successful.)

I found recipes for baba ganoush in some of my favorite cookbooks — including Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food and Arabesque and Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s Jerusalem, and Annisa Helou’s splendid Feast: Food of the Islamic World, which won a James Beard Award in 2019. Online, J. Kenji López-Alt offers his serious take on Serious Eats; The Washington Post’s Smoke Signals columnist Jim Shahin wrote about it and gave a smoky recipe in 2018.

There are lots of recipes out there that include yogurt — which is also wonderful, but not the classic, and many recipes that simply roast the eggplant but stop well before optimum smokiness has been achieved.

Other recipes that I found to be almost perfect have some tiny little detail I felt could be improved. For instance, Serious Eats’ López-Alt calls for not pricking the eggplants, so they’ll cook more quickly and peel more easily, but he also points out unpricked eggplants will explode in your oven (yikes!). In addition, he calls for spinning the flesh in a salad spinner as a way of quickly getting rid of the bitter moisture in them after roasting, which I find cumbersome and messy. I much prefer Roden’s quick and easy solution: mashing the flesh with a fork in a strainer over a bowl; this is much faster than the slow-drain many other recipes call for, and adds no extra work as the flesh needs mashing in any case. (And not puréeing in a food processor, as some recipes recommend — you want to retain some lovely texture and not make it too smooth.)

Chasing optimal smokiness, perfect balance and the creamiest texture has kept me experimenting with recipes for a couple months in order to come up with the best method and proportions. I found that whisking the tahini with lemon juice, as in customary in some of my favorite hummus recipes, results in a baba with superior creaminess. (That idea came from a recipe in Arabesque for the variation of baba ganoush that includes yogurt.)

Yesterday, we finally put it all together — the proportions I favor, and the whisking, which left just one question to answer: Which is better, roasting the eggplant over live coals or under the kitchen broiler? And if one was better, how much better?

We put the two cooking methods to the test, by making two otherwise identical versions of baba ganoush, one using eggplant roasted on live coals (on a chilly Saturday afternoon in February!) and the other in the broiler.

Once they were ready, I spread them on their respective serving plates. Here’s how they looked before garnishing:

Baba ganoush prepared over live coals (left) and baba ganoush prepared in the broiler

The photo probably doesn’t do justice to the visual difference, but the one done over live coals looked more emulsified and somewhat deeper in color. You could tell in whisking them, the live coals version was a bit silkier; though the eggplants seemed to be cooked about as much as the ones in the broiler, the ones done in the Weber were meltier.

In terms of taste and mouthfeel, the difference was starker: The one done on the coals had much smokier flavor, and more depth. I had Thierry and Wylie blind-taste them: The one done on the coals was the clear and immediate winner.

However, they (and we) loved them both: The broiler version was absolutely delicious as well, if a bit subtler. I thought of stirring in some ground cumin, a flourish that seems popular in the version of the dish that comes from Persia. You might consider using a slightly heavier hand with garlic if you go the broiler route, or upping the tahini a wee bit. This is a great dip to play with, to tweak it until it is exactly as you like it — or just cook kind of free-form, adding tahini, lemon juice and garlic by feel rather than measuring.

Another traditional flourish is pomegranate seeds — and once autumn rolls around, the baba ganoush will certainly flow freely at my place, topped with ruby-red beauties.

Until then, I’m loving the essentialist version, and we hope you will too.

RECIPE: Baba Ganoush

How to build the beautifully spiced, mega-healthy, plant-based, cross-cultural soup that could easily change your life

It’s only a few days into the new year, but we’re tempted to proclaim 2020 The Year of the Soup. Yep, we’re thinking it’s going to be a soup-flavored year.

Here’s why. First, plant-based eating is on the rise, and soup is the ideal form for plant-based, soulful hankerings — including vegan ones.

Also, we’ll be hearing a lot about the importance of foods with anti-inflammatory properties this year, as chronic inflammation is now recognized as a major contributor to heart disease, cancer, diabetes and arthritis, and anti-inflammatory eating is widely seen as kind of a “fountain of youth.” Soup is an ideal vehicle to load up on anti-inflammatory superstar ingredients like turmeric — the #1 anti-inflammatory food, according to Michael Greger, M.D., who recently published a compelling new book, How Not To Diet. Ginger and garlic are the second and third most anti-inflammatory ingredients: also great friends of soup.

The most anti-inflammatory components of food, meanwhile, are fiber and flavones — both of which are abundant in the type of super-soup we’re about to provide a blueprint for.

Then there’s the emergence of the zero-waste movement. Making a big ol’ super soup lets you use up produce in your fridge you might have otherwise tossed (or composted) — limp celery, greens that have seen better days, carrot and onion trimmings, the stems of the broccoli from that Chinese recipe you made that called only for the florets, to name just a few. Have a little bowl of leftover sautéed spinach or roasted carrots? Into the pot they go. Make this soup once, and you’ll find yourself saving many more vegetable trimmings going forward (we keep a dedicated zipper bag for that purpose, so it’s easy).

Stuff that came out of our fridge: broccoli stems from a Chinese stir-fry that called for florets only; celery leftover from a crudité platter; a couple of forgotten halved onions, trumpet royale mushrooms from a dish we bought too many mushrooms for. The tough and woody parts of the broccoli stems will get peeled away and discarded.

January is our favorite month to fall in love with soup all over again, following all the holiday revelry — especially soups with health-sustaining properties (as we wrote about three years ago). The health benefits of onions, garlic, leeks, shallots (all members of the detoxifying allium family) and cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and kale have all been well documented. And hey — they’re all awesome in soup!

Meanwhile, who couldn’t stand to lose a little weight? (It’s our resolution this New Year’s, and, ahem, every year). According to Dr. Greger’s book, if you’d like to lose weight, soup is your super food because it’s so filling, nutritious, fiber-filled and low-calorie. This type of soup is legume-based, relying on lentils, one of our favorite foods as lentils are earthy, ancient and soul-satisfying. The fact that they’re (surprisingly to those who don’t know their charms) quick-cooking is a giant bonus: It means this dish cooks in no more than about an hour. An Instant Pot would be even quicker.

Green Lentil & Baby Kale Super-Warming Detox Soup

Do you like spices? Greger’s meticulous survey of medical literature finds that cumin is a powerful appetite suppressants, and he recommends eating it every day. He also touts the truly awesome health benefits of nigella seed, outlined in this medical review, which calls it a “miracle herb.” Both happen to be wonderful in hearty vegan winter soups, as they’re traditionally eaten with lentils.

Finally, there is the flavor factor: This type of soup is so delicious, satisfying and beautifully spiced that we’d be thrilled to eat it even it it weren’t fabulous for our health and good for the planet (especially if you go for organic ingredients and minimal packaging).

Convinced? Hungry? Although we are providing a recipe with this, you really don’t need one — you just need the method — which couldn’t be easier. If you have time to chop things up and wait an hour, you have time to make it. In fact, because we can’t think of what to name it, we’ll call it Sunday Souper Soup.

How to build a Sunday Souper Soup

1. Sweat onions (and other alliuM) and aromatic vegetables

   Heat two or three tablespoons of olive oil (or grapeseed, canola or sunflower oil) in a large soup pot till shimmering, add chopped or diced onion (as much or as little as you like), carrots, celery and any other aromatics you like and have handy (leeks and turnips are nice additions). Toss in garlic (as much or little as you like, or leave it out) — smashed cloves, chopped, sliced, whatever — chopped ginger (if using) and cook another minute or so. You can also add chopped or sliced fresh mushrooms at this point; if you do, let them cook a few minutes till they start to give up their water.

2. ADd spices

   Add ground spices such as turmeric (1 to 3 teaspoons is a good range; 3 makes it pretty turmeric-heavy), cumin, coriander seed, nigella seed. For best flavor use whole seeds and grind them yourself; toasting them in a small pan first adds depth, but isn’t necessary. You can also use pre-ground spices; nigella seed is generally used whole. Don’t know how much? Try a teaspoon of each you’re using (you can always adjust up or down next time). Stir in and cook two or three minutes.

3. ADD LENTILS, water, tomato

   Use green, black, red, brown, yellow or any combination. We love green and black lentils, which keep their integrity, so always include one or both of those. Red and yellow lentils break down quickly into a soupy texture, so it’s nice to include one of those as well. But any lentils are fine. Two cups is a good place to start (that’s enough for a big pot), but the anything between one and two cups (or more) is fine. Rinse them well and toss them in, along with water (6 to 8 cups) and a can of chopped tomatoes (including the liquid). What size can? It doesn’t matter — just depends on how tomatoey you like it. During tomato season, of course, you can use fresh ones, if you like. Now’s the moment to add a bay leaf or three and/or dried mushrooms, if you’re using them (They are optional). You can pause for a cup of tea now, or take the time now to survey what else is in your fridge that you might want to add, and cut it up.

4. ADD longer-cooking VEG

   All of the vegetables in this step are optional. If you want to use harder cruciferous vegetables such as Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, rapini, broccolini and the like, you can cut them up and toss them in just after the lentils, or wait 5 or 10 minutes to toss add them. If you’re using very thick, tough broccoli steams, you might want to peel away the tough part on the outside before dicing. If you have cauliflower rice, that can be added now or closer to the end. Also add eggplant (peeled and diced), green beans, scallions, diced potato or sweet potato — anything you’d want to simmer for 20 or 25 minutes or so.

5. ASSESS LIQUID, AND ADD SALT, PEPPERS/CHILES

   Check and see how your liquid is doing, adding a cup or two (or more) of water as necessary to get the soupiness you like. You can make it pretty soupy, or keep it thicker, like a vegan chili. Add salt (I start with about two teaspoons for a big pot and adjust up from there) and some kind of chile if you like (such as Aleppo pepper, cayenne, chile powder, Espellette pepper, etc.) Taste and adjust (you’ll adjust later again, so don’t worry if it’s not perfect — just don’t over-salt).

6. ADD LEAFY GREENS, TENDER VEGETABLES AND HERBS

   What kinds of greens are cluttering up your crisper drawer — when we last made this soup, we had a quarter-head of napa cabbage, half a bag of arugula that had seen better days and a few escarole leaves we had deemed too ugly for a salad. Slice up larger greens (as we did the cabbage and escarole), and toss in things like arugula, baby spinach or baby kale whole. Other greens that would work great here are bok choy. When we make this soup and we don’t happen to have tired greens sitting around, we usually pick up a bag of baby kale, arugula or baby spinach, and dump that straight in. This would also be the time to add quick-cooking vegetables like zucchini (diced or sliced cut into half-moon slices), along with any leftover cooked vegetables, chopped up or cut into bite-sized pieces. Add chopped parsley (including stems), dill, mint, basil or whatever other fresh herbs you like at this point as well.

7. TASTE, ADJUST SEASONING, ADD WATER IF NECESSARY, STIR AND SERVE!

Sunday Souper Soup is almost ready once the greens go in.

How to use your Sunday Souper Soup, and why it may change your life

(Maybe you can suggest a better name? Tell us in a comment or shoot us an email at info@cookswithoutborders.com!).

• Make the soup on a lazy Saturday or Sunday afternoon (though any day will do) and eat it all week. I’m happy to eat it once a day, either at lunch or dinner, every day for a week, but other people might get bored and want it every other day or so. Either way, it is so healthy, filling and satisfying that you’ll be much less tempted to overindulge — thereby helping with health-minded and weight-loss-minded resolutions. You may want to add some water when you reheat, as it tends to thicken over time in the fridge.

• You can freeze some of it and keep some to eat this week.

• You can add to it, with delicious results. We just heated up the last bowl of a batch, which wasn’t quite enough for the two of us. We happened to have some leftover roasted Savoy cabbage and mushrooms, so we chopped those up and tossed them in (adding a little water), and the cabbage and ‘shrooms gave the soup a completely different quality. Fantastic!

• It’s the perfect vehicle in which to use nigella seeds, turmeric, cumin, dried chile and other ingredients getting attention for their awesome health-promoting properties.

• We love serve it with harissa to stir in at the end (everyone likes a different spice level). Other hot sauces work just as well — and they all have added health kick.

In case it’s helpful, here’s the Sunday Souper Soup in master recipe form:

We’d love to hear what you think of it — and we’d love to hear from you in general! Let us know (or ask questions about it) in a comment, or shoot us an email at info@cookswithoutborders.com.

Ring in the new year with soulful Persian soups starring The Black Eyed Peas

If you live in the American South, you know that black-eyed peas bring good luck for New Year’s. Hence the tradition, down where we live, of eating “Texas caviar” — sort of a cold bean salad starring the world’s cutest legume, along with chopped tomatoes, bell peppers, jalapeños, onions and such, dressed in vinaigrette.

And yet the chill of January is when we crave hot, soul-sustaining, legume-happy soups.

At Cooks Without Borders lately we’ve been in the throes of a Middle-Eastern obsession, which largely consists of poring through a few enticing cookbooks on our shelves that we hadn’t yet explored, and madly, impulsively, intrepidly cooking from them.

Two are titles by Claudia Roden, the award-winning Cairo-born, London-residing author: The New Book of Middle-Eastern Food (first published in 1968, and revised in 2000) and Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, & Lebanon (2006).

Taste of Persia, Naomi Duguid’s culinary romp through Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran and Kurdistan had been beckoning to us from the shelf since it was published three years ago, begging to be cooked from. We’d also been itching to explore Salma Hage’s monumental tome, The Lebanese Kitchen (2012), Uri Scheft’s Breaking Breads: A New World of Israeli Baking (2016) and Anissa Helou’s charming book of desserts, Sweet Middle East (2015).

A few years back (following a years-long Yotam Ottolenghi crush) we fell head-over-heels in love with Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking, by Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook (and we wrote about it here and here).

Batoursh, a Syrian dish that layers lamb cooked with onion and pine nuts with eggplant and yogurt, from Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food.

These days, Lebanese and other Middle-Eastern flavors have been front-of-mind again. Wylie, who is now on The Cooks Without Borders R&D and Development Team (lol), graduated from Occidental College in May, and we’re thrilled to have him at home as he’s job-hunting, having earned a degree in Diplomacy and World Affairs. His girlfriend, Nathalie (who also graduated this spring from Oxy, in Psychology), is staying with her parents in Qatar, as she applies to grad school. It turns out Wylie has the cooking gene, not to mention a passion for it, and that passion is perhaps not coincidentally (as Nathalie’s mom is Lebanese and her father is Syrian) expressing itself in a craving for babaganouj and warm pita bread and spice-laden lamb dishes and baklava, and an irrepressible urge to learn how to cook all of it.

So we’ll have plenty of delicious recipes coming to Cooks Without Borders in the near future, from all over the Middle East — a region whose culinary borders are rather more porous than its political ones.

But for now, we celebrate New Year’s — the Julian calendar’s New Year’s, that is. And that brings us back to soups that feature black-eyed peas. We turned up two of them last week, both Persian, both easy to make and both outstanding.

Ash-e-reshteh, a beans-and-greens soup that celebrates the Persian New Year. Naomi Duguid’s version, from Taste of Persia, features black-eyed peas.

The first, from Taste of Persia, traditionally celebrates Persian New Year, Nou-Roz, which is commemorated not in the dead of winter, but (more poetically) on the spring equinox. It’s called “New Year’s Bean Soup” in the book; the subtitle Duguid supplies, ash-e-reshteh, is the name it goes by in Iran.

As the soup is bursting with fresh herbs and greens along with all those soulful legumes and spices and the noodles that give it the reshteh part of its name, it seems to us perfect for the moment. That it happens to be plant-based is a big bonus: It is vegetarian as is, and vegan if you do without the optional yogurt garnish.

The toppings don’t stop at yogurt, though: There are also fried onions, mint oil and saffron water.

We also found a number of other versions of the soup that we can’t wait to try, such as one from Samin Nosrat published in The New York Times last spring. Another, published in 2012 in Saveur is care of Anissa Helou. They all build on greens and beans in varying combos, with piles of different fragrant herbs (fresh mint, dill, cilantro, parsley) going into to each, they all sounds positively dreamy.

More on that later, no doubt. For now, we are enjoying Duguid’s take. Here’s the recipe we adapted:

The second soup, Ab Ghooshte Fasl (Iranian Bean and Vegetable Soup), is one we adapted from a recipe in Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food.

Ab Ghooshte Fasl (Iranian Bean and Vegetable Soup) is adapted from Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food.

Roden calls for either starting with either lamb or beef as a base; we chose lamb. The only real prep involved is slicing an onion, chopping some parsley, dicing an eggplant and a couple of bell peppers and cutting a few potatoes in half, but the delicious effect is outsized: This one’s going straight into our repertoire.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we do; here’s the recipe:

With that, we’d like to say happy New Year from our family at Cooks Without Borders to yours. Thank you for reading, thank you for engaging with us, thank you for returning after we disappeared and came back; we greatly appreciate it and look forward to serving you and feeding you many dishes, stories and photos that we hope will inspire you in the coming year. We wish you a healthy, peaceful, love-filled and delicious 2020!

Easy pan-roasted seafood antipasto turns a simple pasta dinner into a special event

A funny thing happened on the way to my okonomiyaki.

You know, okonomiyaki – the Osaka-style seafood pancake that homesick Japanese transplants in America go wild for. It's sort of become a cult thing, maybe because it's crowned with katsuobushi – bonito flakes – which wave mysteriously around, making the thing look as though it's alive.

I'm working on a recipe for okonomiyaki; I promise.  You can see a video of my last attempt (it's close! nearly there!) on my Cooks Without Borders Instagram feed. In fact, I'd bought all the ingredients to make it a few days ago – squid, shrimp, scallops and more, thinking I'd nail it that evening.

"Oh, man," said Thierry. "Okonomiyaki again?!" Yeah, yeah, I'd already made it twice in just a couple weeks, but the third time's the charm, right? Recipe development can be a process of trial and error, and this one – which diverges from traditional ones – has proven to be tricky. 

But I'm nothing if not flexible, so I did a quick pivot – Japan to Italy. I knew there was a bottle of crisp white wine in the fridge, along with some parsley, and baby arugula. We have a giant rosemary bush out back. A warm seafood antipasto, I was thinking – that would be lovely with an arugula salad. It would be nice to eat light.

I turned to an old favorite cookbook for inspiration: Evan Kleiman's Cucina del Mare: Fish and Seafood Italian Style. Kleinman is a wonderful chef who for many years had a beloved restaurant in Los Angeles called Angeli that delighted Italian food lovers for decades. When I moved to Dallas in 2009 as a then-incognito restaurant critic, a commenter on one of the local food blogs tried to out me by posting my photo online. Ha! The photo wasn't me, it was Evan Kleinman. That cracked me up. Nice try, amici miei. 

The recipe I found was for pan-roasted squid, calamari arrosto. Kleiman gave the squid a toss with olive oil, fresh rosemary, garlic, salt and pepper, popped it in the oven, roasted it for 25 minutes, then gave it a squeeze of lemon and a parsley garnish. Nice! 

The seafood, tossed with olive oil, rosemary, garlic, cherry tomatoes, salt and pepper, is ready to go into the oven.

I used the same method with the shrimp, squid and scallops, tossing in some halved cherry tomatoes. It worked beautifully. And so easy. 

We poured glasses of crisp white wine, and I tossed an arugula salad. We sat down to a perfect, light, simple dinner, which incidentally would also make a lovely lunch.

In spite of its simplicity, the dish's taste is pretty snazzy. I'm always looking for an easy and delicious antipasto to jazz up a pasta dinner, and this certainly fits the bill.

Want the recipe? It's yours.

Serve it with good, crusty bread to sop up the delicious juices. 

Warm, tender (thoroughly cooked!) asparagus is a simple, wonderful pleasure

If you've never had properly cooked asparagus, you're missing out on something wonderful indeed.

I was reminded of its simple and irrefutable pleasure on a recent trip to Mexico City, over lunch at Máximo Bistrot Local, Eduardo García's glammy restaurant in the Colonia Roma neighborhood. I chose as a starter "espárragos, holandesa, ajo tostado," and loved what was set before me: fat, jumbo asparagus, beautifully trimmed and peeled nearly to the tips, poached to almost custardy tenderness and served with luscious, lightly lemony and perfect hollandaise sauce on one side and silky, buttery pea purée on the other. 

Classic hollandaise for me is a luxury (maybe it's time to rediscover its joys in a post!), but the real revelation on that plate was this: So many professional kitchens send asparagus spears to the table undercooked that if you're accustomed to eating it in restaurants, it's entirely possible you've never experienced how luscious it can be.

(Meanwhile, Máximo chef-owner Eduardo García has a pretty amazing cook-busting-borders story.)

Undercooked asparagus, crunchy and forbidding, can taste like a punishment. But if you simmer asparagus long enough to cook it through, its texture becomes soft and almost creamy, and its lovely flavor comes into full bloom.

It's worth taking the time to peel it first. First trim off the woody end of the stalk, then use a vegetable peeler to (gently, so you don't break the stalk) peel it about two thirds of the way up to the tip. I find that letting the spear rest flat on the cutting board and using only very gentle pressure to peel gets the job done most easily. 

Set a pan of salted water to a boil, add the asparagus and cook, covered, until the spears are tender. How long this will take depends on their thickness. Medium-thin to medium spears will take about 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 minutes, jumbos a bit longer.

But rather than time them, I lift them gently with tongs, and when they're just a bit floppy, like this:

. . . I pull them out.

Then I might serve them warm, letting a small pat of butter melt over them first if that's my mood, or leaving them plain if I'm going lo-cal.

If you know your way around a kitchen, you won't need an actual recipe for this, but in case you do, here you go:

Once you discover or rediscover this simple pleasure, you'll probably want to branch out. You can prepare the spears this way, skip the butter, pour a vinaigrette over them and serve them either warmish or room temp. You can also shock them in cold water, chill them, then dress in vinaigrette later. For the vinaigrette, I might go one of four ways: simple vinaigrette with a little Dijon mustard; the same boosted with a dab of anchovy paste; dressed in a simple vinaigrette then garnished with crushed pink peppers; or dressed in a shallot vinaigrette.

Last spring, I became obsessed with gribiche, which continues to show up on fashionable restaurant menus. Whether you make a classic version or a more modern one (like the new-wave one shown below), it's spectacular on poached asparagus. 

Of course there's an exception to the thorough cooking idea: Shaved raw asparagus can be wonderful in salads or as a garnish on fish or chicken dishes. But when you do choose to cook them, the lesson of thorough cooking holds for other methods besides poaching: stir-frying, roasting or grilling. (Lots of people steam asparagus, but it's not a method I love for this veg.) In any case, if you cook them past that hard, green-tasting crunchiness, they're so much nicer. 

Want more asparagus ideas? Here are a million, more or less. 

Isn't this the greatest season?!

Winner, winner chicken dinner: A crazy-good, winter-into-spring one-pan wonder

As Sam Sifton wrote in a delicious story today in The New York Times Magazine, we're in that frustrating shoulder season when cooks are tired of winter and longing for spring.  Like Sifton, I'm finding inspiration these days – when it's too early for asparagus and English peas – in cabbage. In my case it's gorgeous, crinkly savoy cabbage, which, in my neck of the woods, has been turning up recently with lovely regularity in supermarkets. 

In the past, I've always had trouble figuring out how to treat savoy cabbage right. Usually I braise it, and that's good. Lately I've been roasting it – even better!

Also lately, I've been wanting to create one of those sheet-pan recipes that are so trendy right now. The reality has proved less miraculous than I'd hoped. Though I love the idea of tossing everything onto a pan, shoving it in the oven and forgetting about it for an hour, the truth is that things have different cooking times. Roast chicken thighs with turnips until the chicken is done, and the turnips won't be as tender, golden-brown and caramelized as you'd want them.

Adding the three main components of this dish – chicken thighs, turnips and savoy cabbage – one at a time to the pan solves the problem, deliciously. In fact, I think this one-pan dinner is one of the best things to come out of my kitchen in some time! Chicken thighs are great because they're chicken thighs. The turnips cook longer than everything else, so they get soft and caramelized almost to the point of sweetness, with really concentrated flavor. And the cabbage, which gets an umami boost from shiitake mushroom powder and soy sauce, roasts till it has all kinds of wonderful texture, from soft and silky to crunchy on the edges. The flavors and textures of the three meld together gorgeously. 

It's a dish so simple you can toss it together for glorious weeknight dinner, but it's impressive enough that you could serve it at as a main course for a dinner party. Here's a bonus: It's super-healthy, even for someone watching their carbs. (Turnips have way fewer carbs than, say, potatoes.) 

Here's the way it goes. Toss the turnips in a little olive oil, salt and pepper, throw 'em in the pan and roast 15 minutes. Push them to the side of the pan and add the chicken thighs skin-side down. These you've tossed with a little fennel seed, garlic, salt, pepper and olive oil. 

Next whisk together a little more olive oil and fennel seed with shiitake powder and soy sauce – for that blast of umami. Toss the Savoy cabbage leaves in that mixture to coat, then add them to the roasting pan. Thirty-five minutes later, dinner is ready.

Oh – unless you want a little sauce to pass with it. Either way, with or without, it's pretty great. If you do want sauce, arrange everything on a warm platter, deglaze the roasting pan with white wine or water (the recipe tells you how), and strain it into a pitcher to pass with the chicken.

Want the recipe? You got it: 

Bon app – and happy almost-spring!

Warming lentil super-detox soup is a meatless Monday winter favorite

Post-holiday food should never be about repentance. It should be about deliciousness and healthy renewal – clean eating at its best. 

That's why, after New Year's Eve revelry followed by an indulgent New Year's Eve lunch (on the heels of Christmas feasts and other holiday parties), what I craved for dinner was a warming bowl of chunky, vegan lentil-and-vegetable soup. Happily, I'd created one a couple weeks before – one that my family went crazy for. I'd whip up something like it again.

Only this time, I'd boost the turmeric, said to be a powerful antioxidant with terrific anti-inflammatory properties. And I'd add ginger, which I felt would work with the soup's flavors. And I'd try swapping in some red lentils, which have a softer texture than the green or black ones in the original. I didn't have any baby kale in the house, so I used baby arugula. And I left out the celery.

You know what? The soup was every bit as delicious; the ginger took it in a slightly different (and still wonderful) direction. 

It's a soup that can be all things to all people  or at least many kinds of people. It's vegan. It's gluten-free. The only processed ingredients are minimally processed (a can of tomatoes and the ground spices), so it's very clean. 

It's so soul-satisfying that carnivores probably won't miss the meat. Wylie, home for college for winter break, had three bowls. If you don't mention it's healthy, no one will be the wiser. 

Best of all, you can whip it up in a flash. Putting it together takes about 10 minutes, 15 max (if, say, you're in a post-holiday stupor). In less than an hour, it's done. 

Cooking for just one or two? Make a batch, eat some tonight, then take it to work later this week in a Thermos for lunch. 

Ready for the recipe? Here you go...

Happy New Year!!!